


coda

by NellieOleson



Category: Stargate SG-1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 10:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16554050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NellieOleson/pseuds/NellieOleson
Summary: deleted final chapter for Under Cold Blue Stars





	coda

**Author's Note:**

> This is the deleted chapter from Under Cold Blue Stars. I'm not attaching it to that because it really isn't part of the story anymore. But when i posted that, i said i'd try to clean this chapter up and post it as sort of a DVD extra. 
> 
> So here you go.

***************  
4 years later, 2008  
***************

 

Her death is the only reason he was out there on the ice to find her. 

The day she was supposed to land was beautiful, clear and sunny—perfect in every way. 

Jack will hate those kind of days for the rest of his life. He spends the rest of his career volunteering for the missions nobody wants, the wet places, the cold places. The more miserable, the better. 

They warn him, of course they warn him, and he walks out onto that ice thinking about Russian spies and clones and plastic surgery. But it looks like Sam, and it sounds like Sam. And he starts thinking about amnesia, and how they hadn’t actually found a body. But when the one calling himself Daniel tells Jack his son is dead all he can think is, _how in the hell did they get their intel so horribly fucking wrong._

It’s only later, after he’s seen the tapes he wasn’t supposed to get access to, that things start to make sense. The hours he spends watching her interviews convince him it’s actually her, or some version of her from some other timeline where she’s alive and Charlie is dead. It takes him weeks to come to terms with the thought of aliens and alternate timelines. He’s not used to thinking like that.

His name comes up a couple of times in the interrogations. He watches her answers over and over and over again. She’s not lying exactly, but she’s certainly not telling them everything. 

 

**********

Jack waits a whole month before going to see her. He wonders if anyone told her about the two of them. If she looked up pictures of herself and saw them together. She was the face of NASA for years—young, intelligent, beautiful. She probably inspired a generation of little girls. Hell, boys too.

It isn’t hard to find out where they’d sent her, and he hops a flight to McChord as soon as he works up the courage. He spends two hours in traffic and another pacing outside her building wondering what the fuck he’s doing. 

She looks at him like she’s seeing a ghost. He thinks he must look the same. So many emotions race across her face, and she clamps down on all of them with a swiftness that throws him off.  
Her knuckles are white on the door jamb. Jack feels lightheaded. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” she finally says in a voice that’s not much more than a whisper. 

“I-” He can’t talk, can barely breathe. This was a bad idea. Maybe the worst idea he’s ever had. 

“I can’t do this,” she says.

He can’t either, he realizes, and when she closes the door all he can do is stand there, rooted the floor. 

 

**********

 

She calls him three months later. 

He doesn’t recognize the number so he lets the machine pick up. He snatches the phone out of the cradle when he hears her voice. She’s crying about cereal, and he can’t really follow the conversation but he goes to her again the first chance he gets.

She answers the door this time with the tired look of someone who hasn’t been sleeping well. It’s something he can sympathize with. 

She stares at him for a long time, searching his eyes. “You two were together,” she finally says.

It’s not really a question. He nods and blinks back the wetness in his eyes. He’s always been a minimalist with words but now they’ve abandoned him completely. His hand twitches at his side. He wants to touch her. 

“Come in.”

Her apartment is small and completely impersonal, utilitarian and unwelcoming. It’s nothing like he expects. There are no pictures on the walls, no plants. Just a couch and and a coffee table holding a small laptop and a stack of notebooks. 

“I wanted to—” Jack starts, but he’s not really sure how to finish. He wants to explain himself, explain his reaction, but it’s all too complex for words. “Out there on the ice,” he tries, “you were dead. And then...”

Her expression hardens to something he’s never seen on her face. “She’s still dead,” she says. “I’m not her.”

He thinks she’s wrong about that, because how can they not be? How can this shift in events turn her into a completely different person? 

She motions for him to sit on the couch and takes a seat on the opposite end. It’s a small couch and even though she’s as far from him as she can be, it still feels closer than he was prepared for. 

“So, were you two-”

She doesn’t wait for him to finish the question, and she doesn’t look at him when she answers. “We were.”

Jack nods, glad that they’d had more time together in her timeline for reasons that made no sense, glad that the other him hadn’t lost Charlie and Sam. “A long time?” he asks.

It seems like a simple question but she considers it for a long time. 

“Yes and no,” she finally says. He’s not sure what that means, and she doesn’t elaborate. “How did you two meet without the Stargate program?” she asks, and he can see the wheels of curiosity turning in her head. God, he’s missed that.

“I met you at a park near your parents house. You were there with your niece.” How was it possible for two people to meet under such different circumstances? 

“In Colorado Springs?”

“Yeah,” says Jack.

Sam just shakes her head and looks down at her hands. “My mother died when I was fourteen,” she says after a moment. 

“Not here. I had lunch with her on Saturday.” They’ve kept up their lunch dates through the years. The dynamic had flipped after Sam died, with Elizabeth being the one to show up and drag him off of his couch. He barely remembers that first week. He’d been drunk and angry, and she wouldn’t let him feel sorry for himself. 

Sam closes her eyes and rubs her temples, processing this new information. When she looks at him again her eyes are wet and her voice cracks when she asks, “What about my dad?” 

“Jacob had lymphoma. He died in ‘98.”

“Yeah.” She was expecting that. Maybe he’d died in her timeline too. He doesn’t ask.

“And Charlie?” He has to ask even though he doesn’t really want to know.

She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t try to soften the blow. “He shot himself with Jack’s gun when he was eight years old.”

“Christ. I bet that fucked me… him... up.” Jack feels his stomach sink at the thought of it. How does someone come back from that? He’d only just met Sam when Charlie was eight. He can’t even imagine his life without Charlie in it.

“I didn’t know Jack then. Daniel said it was bad.”

He changes the subject because something about the way she says that makes it feel like an understatement, and he’s not sure he wants to know any more about it. “But you worked together?” he asks instead. “You and ...and Jack?”

“Yes.” He can see the loss in her eyes, and her earlier statement made more sense. He wonders how long they worked together before the situation changed for them. Or if it even had. His Sam was kind of a rebel; she might not have cared about the rules. He looks at her again, and she looks away. Just for a second. And no, this version of Sam was not his Sam. 

They sit on her couch for hours, talking about her past and his. Jack learns a lot in that time about how different she is from his Sam. She’s more guarded and has less of that easy confidence he’d loved so much. Like she’s seen the worst the world had to offer only barely made it out the other side. 

Talking to her is surreal. Sometimes she looks at him and he can see the longing in her eyes that makes his chest hurt. It’s never there long. She can’t quite make him a stranger but she’s trying.

“You really think aliens are coming?” he asks when he’s standing in her doorway again, forcing himself to leave while he still can.

“I know they are. Unless we fix the timeline.”

“Fix it,” he says. Fix it so Charlie is dead, and she’s not. 

“I know you can’t help me.” Sam takes his hand and turns it over in her own, studying it, looking for differences. She traces a scar on the back that he’d gotten after she died. After she’d died and he punched a hole in an unexpectedly cheap hollow core door with a sharp laminate skin. She taps it with her finger and frowns a little like she knows it doesn’t belong there. “Really,” she says. “I understand.”

“Saving this... timeline...isn’t good enough? I mean, things are pretty ok here.” He loves the thought of her being alive in another timeline. But there’s no way he’d trade his kid for it. It’s an impossible choice. And she’s here now, and she’s still holding his hand and he thinks maybe he can have it all. 

Sam smiles a little, but there’s too much sadness behind it to last. He tries not to feel like a disappointment when she looks at him and says, “It might the best we can do.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he is. Exactly what for, he doesn’t know. 

She squeezes his hand and the tears in her eyes are back and he doesn’t know what to do. “God-” she says. “We waited so fucking long. And then-”

He pulls her close and holds her and that, at least, is exactly the same as he remembers. She cries on his shoulder for everything she’s lost. For some version of her life he’ll never truly understand.

 

**********

 

She sends for him at the end because there’s a chair that can somehow defend the planet and he can control it. None of it makes sense, but she’s radiating that confidence again and Jack can’t help but to go along with her plan. And it’s a crazy plan, but it’s a plan to save _this_ timeline. 

He wants that to mean something.


End file.
